Ubuntu 12.10 May Ship With Older, But More Featured, Nautilus

Over in the development land of Ubuntu 12.10, a new version of the ‘new Nautilus’ has landed – bringing with it yet another feature removal.

For years I have approached changing my desktop wallpaper in the same way: right click on the desktop and choose ‘Change Desktop background’.

But in the ‘new nautilus‘ – version 3.6 – this feature is, like the many, many others, gone.

Now, in all fairness, the removal of this feature makes sense… in GNOME-Shell. There Nautilus isn’t used to ‘handle the desktop’.

But the removal doesn’t take into account the many LInux distributions, which includes Ubuntu, that are built upon GNOME but following its touch-centric and pared back GNOME OS design vision.

And so the question that is now being asked by developers and users alike is: Should Ubuntu revert to an older version of Nautilus to keep this feature, and the many others hacked out?

Ubuntu wouldn’t be the only flavour of Linux that Nautilus 3.6 has fallen foul of. Just this week the Ubuntu-based Linux Mint announced plans to fork Nautilus 3.4 inorder to preserve its feature set for their users.